I cover demographic, social and economic trends around the world. I am the R.C. Hobbs Professor of Urban Studies at Chapman University in California and executive editor of newgeography.com. My forthcoming book, The New Class Conflict, will be published by Telos in September.

The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.

The hardening of class divisions has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

All these factors can be seen in the British riots. Race and police relations played a role, but the rioters included far more than minorities or gangsters. As British historian James Heartfield has suggested, the rioters reflected a broader breakdown in “the British social system,” particularly in “the system of work and reward.”

In the earlier decades of the 20th century working class youths could look forward to jobs in Britain’s vibrant industrial economy and, later, in the growing public sector largely financed by both the earnings of the City of London and credit. Today the industrial sector has shrunk beyond recognition. The global financial crisis has undermined credit and the government’s ability to pay for the welfare state.

With meaningful and worthwhile work harder to come by — particularly in the private sector — the prospects for success among Britain working classes have been reduced to largely fantastical careers in entertainment, sport or all too often crime. Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron’s supporters in the City of London may have benefited from financial bailouts arranged by the Bank of England, but opportunities for even modest social uplift for most other people have faded.

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Many places have a welfare state to bribe the lower classes into apathy. They do not have a good work ethic and little motivation to do anything besides collect that government check. The US has it, the Gulf states have it, the UK has it. Rome had it in a way.

But it also diminishes motivation from those earning the money to pay those bribes, so it ultimately leads to mediocrity and perhaps economic collapse.

The root cause is not poverty. Poverty is only a symptom. The root cause is the failure of public schools. The schools are held down by teachers unions, who continuously refuse to accept accountability for performance.

The cure is simple: Give every resident child a voucher equal to the value of government spending, and good at any school public or private. In two generations, we could abolish the welfare state.

In the 1980s we had riots + solutions: expenditure on freezones, city regeneration and similar strategies that did seem to deliver an adequate level of wealth redistribution to quell anger but not enough opportunity to reinvigorate society. I think things are worse now but the formula underlying unrest is different. I don’t believe it is just about depressed living standards. It’s about a loss of faith in progress and this extends across many areas of society and economy. For example the inability to find a cure for cancer is evidence of poor scientifics progress, judged against the recurrent promises. It is interesting to see you writing this around the time other people have been asking are there any big ideas around. I think there are and people are working with them. Ecological issues have been drilled down into personal behaviour and actions so this essentially anti-capital movement is an active and embraced part of many lives. So in medicine, drugs and ecology people see a waning of the power of pogress. Recession is layed on top of many such instances of our operating ideology being challenged adn threatened. There are many possible solutions today but the political class interprets events using yesterday’s frame of reference. I beieve people have moved on and are looking for opportunities to be a part of the solution.

The irony of the riotous flash mobs are that they are using smart phones to organize. The “poor” of today are the middle class of yesteryear. The entitlement mentality has been fostered by a welfare state that is counter to capitalism. You cannot show pity for those without by giving them what they never earned. They will expect it. It is like supplying the addict. It is at least enabling the dependent. The only way these Western civilization disenchanted can be considered underprivileged is that someone told them so. They would be one-eyed kings in the valley of the blind.

I’ve read several analyses of the Britain riots and this is the best explainer. Also, in their condescending efforts to appease the dispossessed underclasses through welfare handouts, governments have created an undercurrent of resentment, now building to a tsunami. It’s like saying, “we privileged ones have sympathy on you incapable, dispensible louts, so we will allow you to grovel at our tables for scraps.” Many feel that globalization is the main culprit in creating the unfortunate mess our world has become. It has enriched the few at the expense of the many, and it has stripped people of identity and purpose. It doesn’t seem that this will make for a good recipe going forward.

As virtually every mainstream analysis, this too suffers from the conceit of “balance” (going out of one’s way to find equal faults on both sides):

Quoting: “A crackdown on criminals — the favored response of the British right — is necessary but does not address the fundamental problems of joblessness and devalued work. Similarly the left’s favorite panacea, a revival of the welfare state, fails to address the central problem of shrinking opportunities for social advancement. ”

The straw man of a ‘left’ focused solely on a ‘revival of the welfare state’ makes for quite a convincing non-solution to our current problems, but it hardly summarizes the actual left position. Re-distribution, increase in infrastructure, education, and public transportation spending, investment in a transition to a green economy, to name just a few of the progressive/left proposals, would indeed be quite a boost for the vanishing middle class (not to mention the poor).

teto: The problem with your suggestion is that it can’t work in a globalized era. Any strong efforts at redistribution would only hasten capital flight, transition to a green economy would create more manufacturing jobs in China, increase in infrastructure was Japan’s malinvestment and rendered no solution. The ‘post industrial age’ was a mirage sustained briefly by a few bubbles, but you can’t stimulate the underlying base of a middle class economy–manufacturing jobs paying good wages–when it doesn’t exist.

The plundering of the social lower classes will increase, if there is a general consent that the kleptocratic, upper-class keeps on getting away with crimes.

Plundering stores is “mimicking” the elite’s plundering of London, its future and sustainable life across most social levels.

Even in a “Feudalistic” society, at least the masters had to feed their slaves—I guess David Cameron does not understand that. “Hard law” and “hard Capitalism” for the less fortunates only and upward socialism and bailouts for the elite no matter how crooked.